Published 10:29 pm, Thursday, September 4, 2014

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal Thursday night that the company will increase security on iCloud following targeted attacks that leaked nude photos of celebrities online.

In the interview, Cook reiterated Apple's earlier statement that the attacks were targeted toward specific individuals. The hackers were able to use various methods to guess those indivduals' passwords. It was not a widespread hack of iCloud.

As a response to the attacks, Apple plans to have new security updates to its iCloud and iTunes login system within two weeks. The updates will notify users directly on their devices whenever someone tries to access their account from a new, unregistered device or tries to change a password. Before, users only got an email.

But while those notifications may be able to give users some time to alert Apple that someone could be trying to hack into their account, they still won't be able to stop the kind of attacks used to access iCloud data like photos.

To fix that problem, Cook said Apple will make improvements to its 2-step authentication security feature, a system that requires users to input a second code sent to another registered device in order to access an iTunes account. For example, users with 2-step authentication can get a push notification sent to their iPhone containing a unique secondary password when setting up an iTunes account on a new iPad for the first time.

But 2-step authentication doesn't cover all aspects of iCloud, including photo storage. Cook said 2-step authentication will apply to iCloud when Apple releases iOS 8, its new mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads, in a few weeks.